“No Bullshit: Welcome to Hooters in Maple Shade, New Jersey” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

I wrote this in April 2006—after four months of reporting—for a documentary writing class my senior year of college. It’s been sitting on my computer ever since. I felt compelled to pull it out of the archives and share it with the world. As I reread it, I wondered to myself, “Why now?” I think the reason it feels worthy of tossing into the ethers now, 19 years later, is because I wrote it thinking I was writing about the male gaze. But I wonder if—in retrospect—I was getting my sea legs as a journalist, and perhaps, what the piece is really—or also—about, is what it means to have a gaze at all. When I wrote this, I didn’t know...

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“Bag of Bones” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

The movers are already leaving Brooklyn, and I can’t leave the apartment. Everything I own in my adult life here in New York City is either at my cousin’s house in New Jersey or in the moving truck headed to a storage unit in Manhattan. There is nothing left in this two-bedroom apartment with a living room skylight that knowingly belongs to me said for the paper napkins from my Bat Mitzvah and my great-grandmother’s handkerchiefs, which I will have accidentally left in a plastic bag underneath the kitchen sink. And still, I can’t move. I am stuck standing on the edge of the living room in front of the brown couch I never liked. I am stuck wrapped in...

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“Study Hall” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

I was in Lugano, Switzerland, on September 11, 2001. I don’t need to tell you what happened that day, but I will tell you that being in Europe at an American boarding school with an international student population spanning some near 50 nationalities impacted how I experienced that day. And not only the day, but the weeks, months, years, and decades that followed. I’d left for Switzerland the fall of my senior year of high school. I’d left my mostly white, mostly affluent public high school in the north suburbs of Chicago, where I was one of roughly 800 students per grade to become one of 80 per year. While affluence certainly took on an even more opulent dimension at...

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“Account For the Rise of [ ]” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

Author’s Note: I spent the first three months of 2002 living and studying in Oxford, England, at a program for Americans taking gap years between high school and college, and British students taking A-level exams. I took three classes: Film Studies, History of the Ancient Worlds, and Dictatorships in 20th Century Europe. For the latter, I had to write three papers: one on Francisco Franco, one on Benito Mussolini, and one on Adolf Hitler. Last week on MLK Day, which was also Inauguration Day, I was sitting in a community action production and talk back of Jordan Cooper’s “Ain’t No Mo’” at the Apollo Victoria Theatre, metabolizing the necessity of art in these times. On the subway ride home, I scrolled...

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“The Case for Shiva” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

Until last March, I could have counted on one—maybe two—hands how many times I’d left dishes in the sink for a sustained amount or length of time—especially since living alone in my current studio apartment for the past seven years without any friends or roommates, or a partner, or any family members for the first time in my life. I just don’t. Leave dishes. In the sink. I love doing dishes. I love the water trickling over my hands. I love amassing the plates and glasses and silverware and pots and pans with sponges and kissing suds. I love the meditative experience of making something pristine, putting it in the drying rack, leaving it to shift. I haven’t taken much...

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“MAD” “LIBS” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

You put your arm around her BODY PART as you get ready to finally say goodbye. It’s been a ADJECTIVE evening, and while you’re ADVERB exhausted, you know it was the ADJECTIVE thing for you to do to VERB and help with clean up. She’s been having PLURAL NOUN lately with her PRESENT TENSE VERB. And as you put your arm around her BODY PART, you move your BODY PART to her BODY PART and say you think all of the PRESENT TENSE VERB has something to do with her NOUN. Then, you do that thing you don’t always do but still often do when it’s a close NOUN and you feel their physical NOUN and you can VERB their...

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“The Poetics of Grief (For NG. For PDB. For AB.)” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

One. It’s impossible to articulate how many moments had to be made possible in the particular order in which they took place and happened and existed and arrived for this particular moment to have been made possible and take place and happen and exist and arrive exactly as it did. I’m going to try—my hardest—to help you understand what it was like to be inside my body at this particular moment I am trying to describe. It’s a Monday evening in December 2024. I have a playwriting grant application due in 21 and a half hours, which will include a 20-page excerpt of my second one-woman play. I’ve been working on this script—in various iterations and incarnations—for years. And there’s...

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“I *Think*” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

I can’t remember the name of the guy who raped me. I think I know it. I think. But I’m not positive. And I don’t have anyone else with whom to fact-check other than myself. This might not seem like a particularly concerning feat, for me to forget the name of a person who caused me a significant amount of trauma and harm. But I remember everything. Everything. I remember details of meals. Lyrics of songs. Lyrics to hundreds and hundreds of songs. I remember movie quotes. Smells. Names. Faces. Things people wore to school or B Mitzvahs or summer camp in 1995. I remember every single detail of the night in tenth grade when I accidentally threw an epic...

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“I Am Fucking My Art” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

When I am on the hunt, I hunt. It is a Saturday night in Manhattan and I am roaming Midtown for a sports bar and a plate of French fries. I tell myself I’m also looking to get hit on. One could say I’m looking to fuck. I leave my phone in my mother’s hotel room. She’s here for work. I want a charged phone when I get back, along with the liberating stench of feeling like a tourist in my own home. No Google. No Yelp. No default humans on the other side when I feel too vulnerably alone. I Googled “sports bars” before I left. I head to one on 50th Street and Third Avenue. I take a...

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“Elect” by Caroline Rothstein

Essay

I am writing this in the past. Therefore, this moment in which I am writing is now historical. An archive. And even though I am writing right now in what will become the past about a moment that has not yet happened, this is a work of neither science fiction nor prediction. And yet, I am writing about a moment I cannot yet predict. About how many moments are unpredictable, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be prevented or elected to be different than we might hope. The day on which I am sharing this with the world—the now now—is the day after an election. The day on which I am sharing this with the world is also the day...

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